Signs of Spring
I spent the late afternoon at the end of the week mending the fence around my vegetable garden. Including, I hope, a break where some deer must have gotten in at the end of last summer. Vegetative vandals making the most of their end-of-summer incursion and leaving me with nothing to harvest.
Afterward, I relaxed on my front steps listening to the calls of recently returned birds. I’d already seen the first robins a week or so earlier, bounce-hopping around the meadow and our lawn. Along with crocus blossoms and daffodils beginning to make their way to sunlight, the robins are the first signal that spring might have serious intentions. The robins joined a chorus with red-wing blackbirds, and a thrasher or two, assuming I can trust the bird identifier app on my phone.
From roughly Thanksgiving through Saint Patrick’s Day, the meadow, the lawn, the garden – indeed the entire Beaverkill Valley where we wintered - have been covered with snow. Snow measured this year not in inches, but in feet. Snow accompanied by unwelcome ice underfoot. White on the ground. Grey sky above. A blanket of discontent. It took a week of unseasonably warm weather followed by heavy rain to expose the parade ground the robins use to announce their arrival, and free the front walk as an icy hazard for humans. The birds, the crocus and daffodil tips, and the greening of the meadow are all early reassurance and promise of a robust spring still to come.
Winter doesn’t surrender without a fight. April snow is not a novelty where I live. A week ago, freezing temperatures and an insistently bitter wind greeted protesters at the No Kings rally in Monticello, New York. Undaunted, protestors lined both sides of Broadway, the main thoroughfare of the town. Passing cars honked in appreciation and support. Chants rang out. Intrepid musicians played despite the finger-numbing cold. What struck me above all was the number and inventiveness of signs. The cold of winter has not frozen ingenuity. Clever statements. Bold banners. Slogans on shirts. Signs on pets and puppets. Energetic rebukes to ICE and the additional chill ICE and its sponsors brought to this winter, among other statements.
As I’ve watched newscasts about the event and followed it on social media, the volume of people demonstrating has been impressive. Signs were a distinguishing feature, no matter the size or the location of a venue. Artistry may have varied, urgency not so. Seeing that sense of urgency, not just to walk alongside, but to openly express a statement, was heartening. The energy of resistance, demanding change, gathered under, or despite winter’s chill, sprang forth. Not as a hint of better times, but as a forceful insistence.
I was heartened to see the work of one of my clever former students, Zach Levy, among the photos of New York City’s demonstration. It was big, it was bold, it proved what the poet William Carlos Williams wrote:
“The imagination will not down. If it is not a dance, a song, it becomes an outcry, a protest. If it is not flamboyance it becomes deformity; if it is not art, it becomes crime. Men and women cannot be content, any more than children, with the mere facts of a humdrum life—the imagination must adorn and exaggerate life, must give it splendor and grotesqueness, beauty and infinite depth. And the mere acceptance of these things from without is not enough—it is not enough to agree and assert when the imagination demands for satisfaction creative energy. Flamboyance expresses faith in that energy—it is a shout of delight, a declaration of richness. It is at least the beginning of art.”
May the creative energy demonstrated by millions so recently spring to positive change in the months and years ahead.
